The Church of San Juan de los Caballeros was the perfect setting for a discussion of an English love affair with Spain, representing as it does the beauty of the old Catholic country that first seduced them. Part of this year's Hay festival in the Castilian town of Segovia, it saw three Englishmen explain how they ended up dedicating their lives to Spain. But the event told you almost as much about English identities as Spanish ones.

Paul Preston, a lapsed Catholic, played the role of the working class Liverpudlian boy whose brilliance saw him win a scholarship to Oxford and rise to become the leading historian on 20th-century Spain.

Giles Tremlett, the Guardian's man in Madrid and author of Ghosts of Spain, was the dashing foreign correspondent with the sharp eye for detail and a nice line in stories about his travels around the country. When he was younger his plan was to visit and live in a new country every three or four years, he says, "but now I've been here in Spain for 18 years".

Michael Jacobs, author of numerous books on the country spanning two decades, was cast as romantic public schoolboy, wandering across Spain, sleeping on the side of the road, in a barn or wherever he found to lay his hat. Indeed, he says, arms windmilling with infectious enthusiasm, "the first time I came to Segovia, I walked from Madrid, and ended up coming into the town on a donkey". Since then, however, he has spent his time "trying to battle those romantic stereotypes".

All three of them have been labelled "hispanistas" in their time, and none seem happy with the term. "An hispanist is someone who is an expert in the Spanish language," says Preston, but somehow it has come to mean anyone interested in all things Spanish. In part that is because the press in Spain is fascinated by how outsiders see it and want to gather all those who write about the country into an exclusive club. "Sometimes it seems that Spaniards think that British historians only study Spain," says Preston. But all agree that while the term might annoy them, it also has its advantages - it certainly gets people talking about their work in Spain.

Preston's success is indicative of what many in Spain admire about a certain kind of Englishness. Each book he releases is a major event in Spain – his latest, We Saw Spain Die, is to be released in the UK next month – and as he wanders around Segovia, he's treated almost like a movie star. El Mundo newspaper even goes so far as to say that the festival only really came alive when Preston arrived.

Preston is occasionally gruff and cynical, but very amusing, interspersing serious analysis with biting one-liners. Later that day he gives a lecture to a packed theatre, speaking for an hour in his perfect Spanish, about the impact of 1968 in Spain to a rapt audience. It is hard to think of many foreign historians who get this kind of treatment in the UK.

Part of what the three men, from their very different perspectives, try to do is to provide a clear, unbiased vision of a country still marked by the fallout of the civil war and the Franco dictatorship. The right and the left, so scarred by events after 1936, find it hard to come to a consensus over the facts of what happened, let alone their interpretation, and this has had a long-lasting impact on modern politics. Sometimes it takes an outsider's eye to give an even-handed account of past and present.